Thanks to his skilled hands and head for math, Clayton Noyes is on a secure career track. The McHenry resident is in the enviable position of finding enjoyable, relatively lucrative work at the tender age of 19, because he took a rather novel path toward success in today’s world: He’s working in a factory.
Indeed, manufacturing, a wide field which encompasses factories that churn out everything from machine tools to household appliances, is suffering from an image problem, say industry experts.
Old stereotypes about dirty, blue-collar jobs are outmoded, said Bob Gardner, spokesman for the Association for Manufacturing Technology, a McLean, Va.-based trade group. “Because the machines on the factory floor are highly automated and much higher tech and more precise than they used to be, it tends to be a much cleaner factory-floor environment,” Gardner said.
So, many blue-collar jobs have faded into positions that resemble white-collar work. “So much of the machines are computer-driven that working (in a factory) is often typical of the white-collar environment found in computer programming,” Gardner, said.
And the industry is hungry for skilled workers.
The shortage is not just because of the overall tight labor market, according to Gardner and other industry experts. Not enough people are attracted to the field, they say.
Some people who have taken industrial arts courses in high school or those who have graduated from similar programs at community colleges or trade schools can step into jobs paying “in the upper thirties,” said Gardner.
Moreover, he adds: “After four or five years experience, it is not uncommon for some of these skilled people to move up to the 50,000 range.”
Still, mothers don’t want their kids to grow up to be factory workers, said Bonnie Stanos, vice president of customer service for Ellison Machinery Co., Warrenville. “Some parents feel, `My child has to go to college,’ ” said Stanos. “But the industry has changed from our fathers’ time. There’s not the dirt and grime.”
Many high school counselors are over-encouraging students to pursue college, when “anyone with good math skills who doesn’t want to go to college” could find a satisfying career in manufacturing technology, said Gardner. Since so much manufacturing is computer-driven, math and related technical skills are paramount, he said.
For Noyes, the idea of going on to a four-year college wasn’t attractive. “I didn’t like English classes or social studies, and I didn’t really have any interest in them either.”
But Noyes did enjoy the four years of math he took in high school, and he excelled in industrial arts classes. Moreover, as the grandson of a machinist worker and the son of a machine shop teacher, Noyes was raised with a favorable opinion of manufacturing.
Now, working as a diemaker at G&M Manufacturing in Crystal Lake, Noyes finds his work as challenging as he envisioned it would be when he was in high school.
The dies, which are like molds, that Noyes helps build are then fed into punch presses, producing such things as pop bottle tops by the thousands.
To encourage more young people to develop a similar interest in the field, the industry is inviting some 4,000 high-school, post-secondary and college students to the International Manufacturing Technology Show at Chicago’s McCormick Place Sept. 6-13.
Though manufacturing technology is an ideal career path for non-college bound students, the field has plenty of room for college-educated professionals, too. At KPT/Kaiser Precision Tooling Inc., in Elk Grove Village, for example, engineer Matt Tegelman says his firm recruits for college-educated mechanical engineers who can design the drilling and other tools that the company farms out to be manufactured.
Stanos adds that at Ellison Machinery, which distributes machine tools and robotic systems, the need is for service engineers or application engineers.
For application engineers, who train people at manufacturing sites how to operate and program equipment, “We are ideally looking for someone with a two-year associate degree in electronics,” she said.
Many in the field pursue a degree while working. Noyes is one of some 600 students around the country that the Park Ridge-based Tooling and Manufacturing Association sponsors in its “apprenticeship” program each year. The apprentices have part of their tuition at a local trade or community college paid by the the manufacturing group. The employer also often picks up all or part of the rest of the tuition.
